In just a couple of hours, Bitcoin price fell below $8,000. Some traders believe that it happened due to some market manipulations performed by a BTC whale.
Bitcoin was doing quite well over the last several weeks showing pleasant for investors growth rates. But last night just in a matter of minutes it suddenly lost almost $1,000 and fell below $8,000 price level.
Nevertheless, by the press time, Bitcoin price has started to gain. Now it is trading for $ 8,011.99. It means that over the last 24 trading hours it has lost over 6%. However, the good news is that its price is still twice higher than it was at the beginning of this year.
Let us remind that throughout 2018 (the period that got a name of the crypto winter) the majority of the world’s cryptos lost around 80% of their value. And BTC that is the largest one by market cap was also among them.
Market Manipulations
While traders and investors are trying to make guesses over possible reasons behind Bitcoin price drop, some of them have supposed that they know the answer. According to one opinion, this serious decline in BTC price can be attributed to the latest sudden Bitcoin sell-off.
In other words, some believe that whales (investors holding large amounts of Bitcoin worth hundreds of millions of dollars) could have manipulated the market.
The drawdown could be a result of such manipulations that presuppose selling a large amount of BTC and then buying this amount back at a lower price. It’s clear that the market is influenced by the supply available. So, after the influx of supply, when the market drops, it’s possible to purchase crypto assets at lowers rates. And as a result, one gets the financial benefit that could be estimated for millions of dollars.
It has become known that a similar scheme may have been applied in this very situation. According to the reports of a BTC and crypto whale tracking Twitter bot, last night somebody moved 25,000 BTC (worth more than $200 million) from an off-exchange wallet to the well-known Coinbase crypto exchange.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 25,160 #BTC (213,365,388 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to #Coinbase
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) June 3, 2019
A little bit later, an amount of 14,000 BTC which equals around $112 million, was moved from Coinbase to another wallet. Then the similar procedure was conducted for further 11,000 BTC, worth $88 million.
One Reddit user made some calculations. According to him, as somebody managed to sell 25,000 BTC for $215 million and buy them back for $200 million, the profit amounted to $15 million (not so bad for an overnight, right?)
Though BTC is the most widely traded crypto, it is still highly volatile to movements of its significant volumes by large holders. The wider market has also reacted to this price drop. Other major cryptocurrencies such as ETH, BCH, LTC, and BNB have also lost a significant part of their value ranging from 5 to 12 percent each on a 24-hour basis. The largest drawdown in the top 10 happened to EOS, which, at some moment, lost as much as a 12.4-percent.
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